I think it’s reasonable to want to make pizza every day of the week. It’s so versatile, and can be as eclectic as your fridge and cupboards allow. You know those crazy Chicago style pizzas, stuffed to an overflowing and greasy pillow of calories? Hmm. I’m not so into those these days. I like the Italian pizza, the one without drippy sauces and doughy crusts. The crust can be mistaken for a flaky cracker and the toppings are not ruled by cheese and cheese alone. Sitting atop a pizza Italian style can be tomatoes, potatoes, anchovies, pears, bleu cheese, mozzarella, eggs, asparagus, and whatever is locally available. It really does transcribe to so many different cultures.

Our pizza the other night for all intensive purposes was a sausage pizza, with a thin crust, less flaky and more crunchy actually. I’m thinking that maybe the flour we used was less than ideal, maybe lacking proteins that bread flours need, as opposed to cake flours. But delicious nonetheless, and really entertaining. We used the pizza crust recipe from the most amazing encyclopedia of Italian cooking, The Silver Spoon. The recipe has you mound your flour and salt into a volcano, and then into a space created in the middle, pour half a cup of water with dissolved yeast. all this happens directly on your kitchen counter. It takes strategy, planning ahead for how you will deal with the river of yeasty water running across your non-level counters. But once you figure it out, damming the river with flour from the volcano, the whole concoction becomes smooth and cohered with a kneading shoulder work-out.

We chose sausage because we had some ground beef that needed to be used. Here’s the fantastic and simple recipe for that, from The Art of Simple Food by Alice Waters:
using your hands, lightly mix together:
1 lb. ground pork
1 tsp salt
1/4 tsp fresh ground black pepper
2 tsp fresh or 1 tsp dried sage
a pinch of freshly grated nutmeg
a pinch of cayenne
Mix well enough to distribute the seasonings evenly, but avoid mashing the meat. Make a small patty of meat, fry it ina small skillet, and taste. Adjust.
OR replace the sage, nutmeg, and cayenne with 2 tsp fennel seeds, toasted and lightly pounded; 2 garlic cloves, pounded to a puree; 3 TB red wine; and optional 2 tsp chopped parsley and 1/2 tsp dried chile flakes.

After forming our pizza crust, we gently distributed some sliced cherry tomatoes and chopped garlic on the crust, drizzling olive oil over the top of these. We baked the pizza at 425 for 18 minutes, and then added our homemade pre-cooked sausage, cheese, and dried basil for 7 or 8 more minutes. The crust really was cracker-like on the edges, but still really good. Next time I’ll try a change in flour and see what happens.

The basic pizza dough recipe from Silver Spoon cookbook (You’ve never heard of Silver Spoon? I want a semester of my life to be spent dwelling in this book, so many more recipes to explore!):

1 1/4 cup all-purpose flour
3/4 tsp. salt
1/2 ounce yeast
1/2 cup lukewarm water
olive oil for brushing

Sift the flour and salt into a mound on a counter and make a well in the center. Mash the yeast in the water with a fork until very smooth and pour into the well. Incorporate the flour with your fingers to make a soft dough. Knead well, pulling and stretching until it becomes smooth and elastic. Shape into a ball, cut a cross in the top, place in a bowl and cover. Let rise in a warm place for about 3 hours until almost doubled in size. Flatten the dough with the palm of your hand and roll out on a lightly floured surface to a round about 1/4 inch thick. Brush a cookie sheet with oil or line it with baking parchment. Put the dough round on it and press out until it covers the area. Make sure the rim is thicker than the center. Sprinkle with the topping ingredients, leaving a 3/4 inch margin around the edge.

Home cured, home made, home cooked corned beef.

Check it out, people. It takes days to cure before cooking. And it is that time of year. It’s a good sign that it’s finally corned beef and stout season. Longer days are already here and warmer days supposedly are slipping around the corner. I also love the theory behind this roast, soaking the meat in a brine solution with stout beer and pickling spices, the house filling with complicated smells as it cooks. Yet it’s so easy to put the whole thing together on the stove and forget about it- welcome to my week. Ahh… forget about it.

The recipe, from epicurious.com:
Homemade Irish Corned Beef and Vegetables

Oh baby, pat that rump. Rub that salt and pepper into that tender roast.
Sounds so seductive, so ooh la la like. But eugh yuk, I hate that part.
And I would do it all over again, tossing my groans and shrieks frivolously out to the nonexistent members of my pity party.

Have I told you about Culinate before? It’s a great site, culinate.com, that comes to us from Portland. I haven’t even begun to explore all the nooks and crannies of their pages. But they have many attainable recipes out there, all free and accessible to all us free people! I usually prefer to dream my meals from under my feather comforter, eventually taking to the kitchen in a flurry, whipping out all the things that need to be used; things I am down-right irritated with, sick of, or items about to go bad. Other times, though, there’s nothing better than perusing blogs and sites like culinate that allow me to find inspiration for particular dishes, developing a list of ingredients that I can shop for on my way home from work. Yesterday before leaving work I found five recipes that I wanted to make and eat straight away. I finally narrowed the options to two. We ate at 11pm. Of course the two recipes I chose took 2 & 4 hours to make.

Let’s start with the recipe we actually did eat for dinner last night, and one that I will duplicate with some variation for the rest of my life. It was seductive, rich, so flavorful, and beautiful. The flavor is amazing, the ingredients are few. It’s quite simple and worth the wait. A normal person, though, would make this on a weekend, so that the hour of eating is reasonable and kind to your stomach.

The recipe calls for a 2 pound rump roast, cooking it in a wine, espresso, tomato based medley, at the astronomical temperature of 475 degrees for 3-4 hours. We used a 2 1/2 pound roast, so unfortunately the entire roast wasn’t submerged in braise. I think it would have been substantially more fork tender had we been able to cover the roast in liquid. Keep in mind that the liquid reduces as it cooks. I also prefer my pasta to be saucier than meatier, so we actually didn’t even use half of the meat in our sauce. Josh is more than okay with that- more meat to snack on throughout the week.

So here’s the recipe:

Sugo di Carne

4. Bring a large pot of salted water to a boil and cook the pasta until al dente. Drain and toss with the meat sauce. Serve warm with freshly grated Parmesan cheese.

Frenetic, frenzied,and frantic. How to cope? The day disappeared out from under you like the magic genie got friskie and whisked it away. There was one task after another, each of them seeming to simultaneously build towards a greater nothing, a pyramid to nowhere.

But alas, my dears, it went to a heaping, helping bowlful of fried rice. Leftover, coconut oil cooked white basmati, tossed in almost as an after thought to the celery, onion,garlic, pine nut, coriander, cumin, cayenne, tahini des coupage. That’s right. That’s it.

Oh; and olive oil plus a fried egg.

Let me ask Josh what is in the fried egg.. ah, yes: salt, anise, cloves, cinnamon, fennel, and pepper.

What to do when you are paupers, hungry, meek and mild. Little for cash flow these days, but spilling over with passion and desperation for all things life.

I think we’re ready.
A little fried rice.
Smith house style… in February… when it’s below zero… and that fridge seems all together empty. Hooyah! It’s not. It’s fried rice.

I always feel a little jumpy blogging about meat dishes, as though spirits of the beef will rise in my dreams and haunt me through my vegetarian friends (and I have a lot of those.) But I haven’t blogged in forever, and Josh made a really assuaging dinner so this just needs to happen. You need to hear about this over and again fabulous book, the marinade that you can use twice, and the absolutely brainy potato and horseradish cake. Josh swears the secret is in the rosemary we have bunched and hanging daintily on our kitchen wall, pounded with three cloves of garlic in a positively heavy and murderous cast iron mortar and pestle. I’m always a fan of a good recipe that incorporates red wine. This inevitably means that you buy one bottle for cooking with and one bottle to drink as you’re cooking and eating. Perhaps by the end of the meal you are a bit more smashed than you otherwise would be because you had two bottles of wine open; a true recipe for unabashed sleep and cozy moments around an otherwise imperfect day. This recipe comes yet again from a library borrowed cookbook, Jamie Oliver’s: Jamie’s Kitchen. The recipe is somewhat adapted and abbreviated.

I have no idea how big our roast was, but I do know that it was a rib roast not too hefty or huge. This should be generously seasoned and patted and prodded with salt & pepper (this would be the husband’s part, if not the whole meal, in my meager opinion.) Then with that mortar and pestle, don’t be shy, pound and press the rosemary and garlic together (1-3 cloves). Loosen this with some olive oil, more than you might think (up to 5TB) and rub into the beef (call for the husband or less queasy counterpoint again.)

Preheat oven to 450. Parboil (which means blanche) six or so medium waxy potatoes in boiling and salted water for about 5 minutes. Drain, transfer to bowl and coat with olive oil. Season well. Using a non-stick and greased cake pan or a nonstick metal frying pan, layer half the potatoes and then smother with 3TB (more or less depending on your tastebuds) of creamed horseradish. Then finish layering with other half of potatoes. Put aside for now.

Brown the beef on all sides in a snug-fitting roasting pan. Add garlic to pan and place beef on top. Place in oven with the pan of potatoes below. Cook for 20 minutes, then turn beef over, baste, and add 1/2 bottle of red wine and 1/4 cup butter. Remove the potato dish, place a clean towel carefully over the potatoes and apply pressure to compact potatoes into a tight cake. Replace in oven and cook for 15-20 more minutes.

After this time, remove and test roast. Cook to your desired temp, then allow roast to rest. Brown potatoes in oven about 5 more minutes if needed. Serve juice as an au jus, or cook to a gravy. We chose the au jus, and had plenty left to use for another dinner tonight.

In addition to this we had wild rice, a simple roasted squash, and endives we dipped into an equally simple and homemade vinagrette adapted from Nigella Lawson’s Feast, Food to Celebrate Life:
Use 1 tsp grainy mustard, 1 TB tahini, 3 TB extra virgin olive oil, 1 tsp sherry vinegar, few drops of honey, salt & pepper. Whir all these together and toss with the endives or just dip like we did; we are a wild and uncivilized pair. It was refreshingly raw and crunchy and bitter. Yum.

A note on the separated role of male as rubber, believe me, I am a fairly independent woman. All friends who knew me prior to Josh would probably say this was my most endearing and irritating quality. But I know my limitations, and rubbing, seducing, or pulverizing meat is one of them. Forgive me, readers, for assuming you may partake in a similar process of thought.

And just to mention tonight’s experiment, I roasted the other half of the roast we had bought, salt, pepper, thyme, savory, and oregano sprinkled and tossed on (Josh was in class and unavailable to assist in the rub down). This roast was cut in half length wise, and then half a large onion situated in between the two halves. Two pears were chopped, cores removed, and tossed in, and the remaining au jus of dinner past poured on the whole concoction. Another simple roasted squash and some short grain brown rice on the side made for a very balanced dinner. I was terrified when Josh came home and thought the pears to be potatoes. I realized that he was about to be shocked, and I felt terrible that he would be disappointed with finding that his chewing would result in fruit, not potato. Potatoes are, afterall, really all he needs in life. And these were pears. He was anything but disappointed. He loved them. They were beautifully tainted purple, as were the onions, from roasting in the red wine au jus.

I guess the idea of this second dinner could easily be transposed to tofu, pork, chicken, or potato cakes. But one reason the au jus was so good the second time around is that there were meaty juices that resulted from the original roasting. Pretty hard to make vegetarian. And not an ounce of disappointment to report.

And it all ended with my eyes closed and breathing rythmic… sleep sleep sleep come to me. I must go to bed, but before the inevitable crashing of my bones, I want to relay a wonderful soup recipe that Josh prepared last night to eat today. Also I must elatedly bombard you with this really exciting news:

We are now partial owners of a really beautiful red jersey cow!!! Josh was able to meet her today while I started my first day at my new job as Farmer’s Market Manager in Ypsilanti. I’ve been reading and dreaming and wondering over raw milk for many months, almost reaching the category of years, and finally the desire crossed paths with reality.

So here are the three things I think you must know about the good life of cold December Michigan….
1) this recipe, Coriander Orange-Scented Red Lentil Soup, that Josh overheard on the Splendid Table (NPR) and then made for dinner. It’s really quick, really easy, and perfect for sweet and spicy teeth.
2) this delicious raw milk, more descriptions to ensue
3) the new workplace at a non-profit called Growing Hope, with more info to come hopefully sooner than later